Inventor of email, VA Shiva Ayyadurai recently wrote a book about his remarkable discovery at the age of 14. He told Iknoor Kaur that if he had been in India he would not have had so much creative freedom
There are few people who are smart enough to invent something at the age of 14. And VA Shiva Ayyadurai is one of those. He was born in Mumbai, brought up in a village in Tamil Nadu, taught in New Jersey and as a 13-year-old, he was offered a course in computer programming in New York University, a year after which he revolutionised communication in every office environment. The man was only a 14-year-old boy then, but he created his own operating system and named it ‘email’. Today, 36 years after his invention, he revealed his entire story that was hidden behind patterns, software, database and wide area networks in a book calledThe Email Revolution: Unleashing the Power to Connect. Excerpts from an interview.
What does the book talk aboutIJ
The book has three parts to it and I would call it the Bible of email. The first part of the book explains the physics of email. Social media can’t help you retain customers. It’s like a trade show. In terms of communication, text messaging is for informal communication. Email is intimate. I call it a unique medium for formal communication. So in the first part I explain everything about the email — from the way I conceptualised it to the way it should be used.
The second part of the book is about my second life with email. In 1993, I was in MIT analysing patterns and the White House ran a competition to analyse email and categorise it. Since my PhD work was good, I got to participate in it and I won. I created technology that could extract attitude off email. I could read whether the person was angry, sad or happy. Bill Clinton was hiring people in 1993 to just do that, they were manually categorising it. They had 147 different categories. Clinton wanted to use it as a marketing medium for market research. I created EchoMail instead which organised and managed email. Along with this, in the second part, I give 15 case studies about how EchoMail helped businesses use emails for marketing. Oprah Winfrey used our system for education.
The third part is about privacy and democracy. It is time we realise that emails should be a part of the postal mail system and not privatised.
What were your formative years likeIJ
I was born in Mumbai, but my parents were from the interiors of south India. I remember a lot of my time in Mumbai during my formative years. I wrote a book in 1996 where I compared parts of the Internet to Mumbai because I thought it was so wild. But my early experiences in Mumbai were diverse. I would see skyscrapers, huts, different races and religions. So I grew up with a lot of tolerance for certain things. This was one part of my life. Then the other part of my life was in this village in Tamil Nadu where my grandparents were rice farmers. During the weekends my grandmother would have 20-30 people lined up outside her house and she would look at their faces and predicted what was going on in their bodies. She was aSiddhar. Thus, at a young age I was trained in meditation and was given diksha. That made me interested in medicine. And after that came the third part of my life — United States.
Is that when email happenedIJ
My dad came to US for training but it turned out that he knew more than the US engineers. So they invited him to join them. He got a job in New Jersey and we moved to one of the poorest cities there. However, my parents would save their money and move to different and better school systems. In 1977 we returned to India and I saw how different India was. There was distinction between rich and poor and I wanted to change that. I studied really hard and that year I topped all classes and got accepted into a university at the age of 13. I did a course in computer programming at NYU. It was a special course and they chose only 40 people from the US. After I finished that programme I was a trained programmer. My mother introduced me to a physicist in a small college in Newark. The physicist told me, ‘look I’ve set up a wide area network like a computer network and we have an interoffice system. Would you like to put this in electronic formIJ I liked the idea. So I was this little anthropologist and made a listing of the entire interoffice system — inbox, outbox, receipts, carbon copy. Once I did that, I made the computer programme and used Fortran as a computing language (now it’s an old one). I had to name this programme something so I created a word, EMAIl, which didn’t exist in the English language. I created this word because the Fortran language only allowed you to have a word of five characters in the operating system. If I had more characters I would have made it electromail. I defined the term. If you look at the Oxford Dictionary it puts the origin of the word as ‘79, that’s when I created it. But Webster puts it as ‘82, that’s when I got my copyright. In 1980 the copyright rules changed and you could copyright software. So in 1981, I wrote to the US government and got my copyright.
You created email in 1978 but recently disclosed it, whyIJ
I went to MIT, got four degrees, worked in six companies and never thought about the email invention. It was only in 2011 when my mom was dying, she gave me a suitcase where she had saved all of the computer code and copyright notices for the email. A friend of mine came over and saw this stuff. He said, ‘You’ve created email, why aren’t you telling anyone.’ I didn’t go to medical school to create email. It was a side job. What I was actually doing was analysing sleep patters because I was interested in what my grandmother was doing — medicine. So email was just a hobby, I didn’t think much of it.Time magazine did an article followed by others and then I started writing this book.
There was a lot of controversy behind this as well...
This is a normal thing to occur in such situations. In the case of email, the controversy was created by Raytheon which is a BBN, multi million dollar company. But the reality is that the people who supported Raytheon had an agenda. When Raytheon had bought over BBN, they said they were the inventors of email. But they didn’t invent email. They invented text messaging. We found a document that cleared the air. After these people attacked us we started looking into them. In December 1977, months before I created email, David Crocker from Raytheon wrote an important report saying ‘We have made no attempt to create the interorganisational mail system. It is far too impossible to do that.’ This was a smoking gun.
I didn’t use any of their stuff. I used Fortran, a database and wide area network. I didn’t need Apranet or Internet. You don’t need Internet to use email. They created the controversy.
You invented email in the US. Do you think you could have done the same in IndiaIJ
I had good parents. I had teachers who were very supportive. I had a good mentor and I was given freedom and respect even though I was only 14. People in India get none of this.